


An Experiment to Verify the Phenomenon of Apodiabolosis (Performed and Documented by Alastor)

by ckret2



Series: RadioSnake Discord - Spicy Showdown Week [7]
Category: Hazbin Hotel (Web Series)
Genre: 1920s, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Dialogue Light, Fade to Black, First Meetings, Ghost Sex, Ghosts, Historical, M/M, Occult, Pre-Canon, Wet Dream, featuring real (but VERY fast) research on how to summon demons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:35:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24360679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: What Alastor was trying to do: prove the theory that dead humans, if sufficiently evil, can be promoted above their fellow damned sinners and made into full-fledged demons, and show up a couple of naysayers among his fellow occultists that think otherwise.How he tried to do this: by contacting the spirit of the most evil person he could think of—a deceased Victorian-era supervillain—but by using a ritual to summon a demon rather than a ritual to contact a ghost.What he hoped to get: confirmation that said villain could be summoned that way, and thus had been turned into a demon.What he actually got: haunted.... Haunted and seduced.
Relationships: Alastor/Sir Pentious (Hazbin Hotel)
Series: RadioSnake Discord - Spicy Showdown Week [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1732291
Comments: 3
Kudos: 95





	An Experiment to Verify the Phenomenon of Apodiabolosis (Performed and Documented by Alastor)

**Author's Note:**

> So _three_ weeks ago, the Radiosnake discord I'm in hosted a NSFW event called [Spicy Showdown](https://hanekdraws.tumblr.com/post/616864101916983296/were-having-our-first-event-on-the-radiosnake), which included a prompt each day. I fell behind because I kept writing longer fics than I meant to. Day 7 (final day!) was "Human". I didn't want to write an AU where they'd been born at a time where they could meet each other in life, and I didn't want to cheat by leaving them in their normal demon forms and only using "human" in some symbolic sense, so I decided to make Alastor human/alive and Sir Pentious a ghost.
> 
> This fic's fade-to-black instead of The Full Smut because 1) I just wrote six smut fics (seven if we count the one I happened to write shortly before spicy week) and I'm tired, 2) I couldn't think of any sex acts they could do that would contribute in any meaningful way to the story, and 3) fade-to-black fit the pseudo-spooky sorta-dreaming ghost story vibe of the fic better. Enjoy your tastefully obscured non-smutty spice.
> 
> Before anyone asks: Alastor's occultist pen pal in Memphis isn't supposed to be anybody. I just wanted to be able to say that he's got friends/colleagues somewhere out there, and Memphis seems like the kind of place that an occultist in a cartoon would come from, primarily because of the Bass Pro Illuminati Pyramid.

It was well past noon and almost two hours after Alastor's bedtime when he gave up on the demonic summoning in discouragement.

No results. He wasn't surprised—this entire evocation had been an experiment from the outset—but he _was_ disappointed. He had a pen pal in Memphis who was never going to let him live this down.

But he was too tired and hungry to care. He had a quick dinner, collapsed on his bed, and passed out.

###

Alastor dreamed of a serpent twice as long as he was tall, scaled in gold and black, covered in wide eyes. The serpent lurked in shadows in Alastor's room that were far too dark for the time of day he usually slept, lounging atop a chest of drawers like a throne—and only after staring long at the serpent did Alastor realize that its top half had morphed into a human, dressed down to the waist in clothes like humans had ceased to wear before Alastor was born.

The serpentine figure glowered down at Alastor from on high, its features vaguely familiar but shrouded beneath the brim of a hat. Its eyes glowed with a malicious, devilish evil like Alastor had never before seen.

Whatever the bizarre creation was—it was no human.

Alastor woke with a gasp, bolting upright in bed, heart pounding—and then grimaced in discomfort as he realized his underwear was disgustingly sticky. Wet dream.

 _That_ had been strange.

###

Alastor had a little theory he'd wanted to test.

Apodiabolosis—the opposite of apotheosis—the process by which a human was demonized, either metaphorically or literally. Such promotions from "damned" to "demon" were only offered to the worst of the dead sinners in hell, those lifted out of the ranks of those to be tortured and given the responsibility of meting out tortures instead. Alastor was _sure_ he'd read such a thing was possible, was sure he'd even read the name of one such demon who had human origins.

But he couldn't remember which text and couldn't remember which demon, and couldn't find it in his _own_ texts, and the occultist friends he wrote to about the topic scoffed at the suggestion. So now he had a point to prove. And he had the perfect way to prove it.

The way to prove it was to contact a demon that had once been human.

There were different rituals, different precautions for calling up a human spirit versus evoking a demon. If he tried to call a human spirit using a demon evocation, and the human showed up—well, that would be proof that the human was now a demon, wouldn't it? All he needed to do was try to summon the right human.

If _any_ human would be turned into a demon, Alastor reasoned, it would be the kind of human who was already heavily demonized in the mortal world. Someone who demonstrated unfathomable evil.

He didn't even have to think over who he was going to evoke.

Alastor kept his books on a small bookcase next to his desk; his room was small enough that part of the bookcase was pressed behind his desk. He kept the books that might worry his mother hidden in that part of the bookcase, where he could still reach back to grab them but where they weren't visible at a casual glance. That was where he kept his copy of the _Dictionnaire Infernal_ and a booklet of the _Pseudomonarchia Dæmonum_ ; and it was also where he kept a collection of books—biographies, histories, military analyses, technological treatises, etc.—all about the man who was, in Alastor's opinion, the most interesting figure in history.

The man who, when told that his indiscriminate massacres had earned him a place in the deepest and coldest circle of hell a thousand times over, had reportedly laughed and declared that if there _was_ a hell, Satan would bow to him when he arrived.

The man who had single-handedly conquered more land, razed more cities, and slaughtered more people than any army with thousands of soldiers ever could.

The man who had invented such terrifying war machines that not even what was seen in the Great War some thirty years after his death could match the worst of his horrors.

The infamous, villainous, marvelous Sir Pentious.

But the evocation had yielded nothing. So much for that.

###

Alastor slept with the radio on in his room. (He swore, half of his spare money went to batteries to keep his homemade radio running nonstop. The papers said that within the year there would be a way to wire radios into the same electricity system that powered the lights, which would be a big relief to Alastor.) He usually woke up around seven, just in time to hear the evening broadcast of children's bedtime stories.

Today, between getting to bed past noon and the interruption from his strange dream, he'd only woken after eight when his mother had come to check on him to see if he was alright. He'd had to rush his breakfast/her dinner—a shame, because he'd been required to fast for three days before the attempted evocation and he was still famished.

Then off to work.

Alastor was lucky enough to have snagged himself a position at one of the first radio stations in Louisiana. He supervised with the broadcasting of late-night musical performances, usually announcing the orchestras and bands himself, and performed the evening sign-off; during the witching hours he wandered New Orleans' more disreputable corners, picking up jazz bands at speakeasies or fascinating fast-talkers on street corners and asking how they'd like to stay up a few more hours and be on the radio; and in the morning he performed the sign-on and was on the air himself, along with whatever shady talent acts he'd scrounged up during the night—or, if he couldn't find any, himself, cheerfully monologuing on whatever came to mind for a solid hour and a half—sometimes up to three hours, when they had time to fill and nothing scheduled to fill it.

He was the only employee on both the evening crew and the morning crew, the one to lock the doors at night and unlock them in the morning, and the one whose shows dragged in the most fascinated letters and the most perplexed but intrigued sponsors when other stations' morning broadcasts were languishing. He didn't know what the diurnal employees thought of him, the management that tended to show up for the day about the same time Alastor tended to leave—but as far as he was concerned, he was the king of this radio station.

Alastor would be so bold as to say he might just be the happiest man in New Orleans. The only way his job could be better—and he'd had to put some serious thought into the matter—would be if he could haul a man into the studio, slit his throat, and play his dying gurgles over the air. But what job was _perfect?_

Tonight, though, something was strange.

Tonight, he felt like he was being observed. That wasn't so strange at ten in the evening, at the studio surrounded by his fellow employees; some days he even thought he could feel an odd psychic impression of distant audience members listening to their radio receivers.

But the sensation lingered after midnight, when everyone else had drained out of the radio station, when he should have been alone to make sure the lights were off and the doors were locked. It lingered as he walked through dark streets, like somebody stalking him from a block behind—but any time he turned nobody was there. It lingered as he slipped into illicit clubs, ordered his drinks, watched the shows, made small talk. It lingered when some angry drunk white man took offense to something Alastor had said—or maybe he was offended by Alastor's hair, Alastor genuinely hadn't been paying attention to him before he got aggressive—and Alastor had gamely ducked outside with him to brawl so the noise wouldn't draw undue attention to the covert club.

No matter where he was, how crowded or how alone, how wide and barren the street or how small and isolated the room, the presence lingered.

Stranger still—it didn't make Alastor nervous. It didn't make him afraid. He liked the sensation, this constant invisible audience.

Alastor left the angry drunk with a broken nose, two missing teeth, and a head reeling too hard for him to remember in the morning whom he'd gotten in a fight with, and Alastor was sure he wouldn't have fought half as valiantly if he hadn't sensed that there was somebody watching he needed to impress.

He didn't bring any performers back with him to the studio that morning; despite his poor sleep and diet of the last few days, he was energized and exuberant by that night's excursion, eager to chatter away as long as they'd let him keep the microphone—just as long as somebody was listening.

Maybe his evocation _had_ summoned something.

###

So, Alastor was haunted.

By what?

By the time he reached home, he'd determined that he must have accidentally invited over an unknown demon—something that had taken the opportunity to slip through when he'd been calling a name for which there was no demon to answer. He'd thought he'd closed out the evocation properly to ensure he sent back any invisible demons he might have called up without detecting, but he _had_ been fasting for three days, maybe he'd done it wrong.

He said good morning to his mother, made them dinner/breakfast, apologized to her for not being around much the last couple of days—working on a small project in his room, just a little improvement on his homemade radio, no he's not going to burn the house down, don't you worry, he'd never do something dangerous under the same roof where his dear mother sleeps—and then he retreated to his room to pull out his occult books from the hidden part of his bookcase.

By bedtime, he had five suspects.

Vépar was the weakest option—he was described as looking like a mermaid—but what was a mermaid anyway, human up top and long fish tail down below? Alastor had been asleep, he might have misinterpreted a fish tail as a snake tail.

Orias and Amon, both ranked great marquis, both described as having a snake's tail—but Orias was described as having a lion's upper half and Amon as having a wolf's. (The _Dictionnaire_ included an illustration of Amon. It wasn't flattering.) The apparition's face had been shaded and upper body had been clothed, maybe it had hidden strange anatomy. More importantly, among the demons Alastor had found with snake tails, they were the highest ranked—which probably meant that as angels they'd been similarly highly ranked before falling—which made them more likely to have been Seraphim, Cherubim, or Thrones. The classes of angels that were covered in eyes. Just like the demon he'd dreamed about.

The last two options were physically closer. Martym, described as a human having a serpent's tail—some artists depicted that as a full human with a tail like a monkey, but the _Pseudomonarchia_ didn't _say_ that, so Alastor tentatively included him anyway. And Otis, described as an "ugly viper" who could shift his shape into a human form. Alastor hadn't thought the apparition was ugly, but he supposed that was subjective, wasn't it? It was covered in eyeballs and radiated unadulterated evil, most people would consider that ugly...

And all the while as he did his research, he felt that fascinated presence watching him. He'd hoped it might find some way to signal him if he was on the right track. Nothing. No pages fluttered, no lights guttered, no boards creaked. His radio, tuned to white noise in between stations so he could focus, hissed.

The texts Alastor was working with only contained a list of _known_ demons, the demons that purportedly came if you called. The cooperative ones. The _Pseudomonarchia Dæmonum_ listed a mere sixty-nine demons; surely hell held more fiends than _that_. And whatever demon slipped through from hell to the mortal world through a summoning under somebody else's name, like a man sneaking into a theater without a ticket, was probably not one of the cooperative ones.

Considering the way he'd woken up—maybe an incubus? Or a succubus—typically succubi visited men, but he'd gotten a sense of masculinity off of the apparition, he didn't know what that meant—could succubi sometimes be masculine or could incubi visit men...?

He was tired. It was late. He could think more on it and maybe pen some letters to other occultists later.

He jerked off before bed to ensure he didn't have a repeat of last night—ever conscious of unseen eyes watching him. Although he woke up a couple of times with heart pounding and breathing heavily, he didn't remember his dreams.

###

He had to put his demonology texts away before leaving for work—the last thing he wanted was for his mother to come into his room for some reason and see Amon's ugly face leering up from an open book. He stripped bits of paper from the margins of the day's newspaper to serve as bookmarks. Sticking the texts away in their inaccessible nook halfway behind his desk required pulling out several other books that were in the way—including his collection of books on the heavily-documented works and far more mysterious life of Sir Pentious.

He took a moment to look over one of the books he'd had to pull out—a thick tome covering every single verifiable fact that had been dug up about Sir Pentious's life by the time of its publication in 1913, without any of the wild speculation about his history that plagued many other biographies (and that typically revealed more about the authors' biases than they did about Sir Pentious's identity). He'd bought this copy used, and between the condition he'd got it in and how many times he'd referred to it, he'd worn out the binding and had to amateurishly re-bind it with cardboard and a strip of deerskin.

He flipped it open. On one of the first pages was a photo of Sir Pentious, one of the only known portraits of him that he'd posed for: smirking smugly, hat off to reveal the full scandalous length of his straight black hair, one of his pet snakes menacingly draped over his shoulders. The most disappointing part of this failed experiment was that Alastor thought he might have actually liked getting a chance to talk to Sir Pentious. He supposed he could try again once he'd figured out how to send his watchful demon home, there was no reason he couldn't just call Sir Pentious up like any other ghost... but it seemed gauche to try to make contact with the spirit of a celebrity without a _reason_ for it, didn't it—

And that was when Alastor _felt_ something.

Something light, insubstantial. Like a breeze, maybe; but like a breeze that was trying to _touch_ him, pressing against his back through his underwear.

Through the white noise hissing out of his radio, Alastor was sure he heard words, like it was trying to faintly pick up some distant station:

" _Oh—I've got an admirer, do I?_ "

###

Radios were so new—quite likely, no occultist had ever had an opportunity to study how they interacted with spirits. Quite likely, no occultist had ever thought to before Alastor. Few people who were inclined to dig deep into centuries-old Latin manuscripts were also scrambling to keep on the cutting edge of technology. Fewer still had unrestricted nighttime access to a fully-operational radio station.

Alastor could barely focus for the first half of his shift.

Spirits were essentially floating energy, weren't they? Just like radio waves. If they were on the right frequency to manipulate radio signals—oh, wouldn't that be _amazing_...

Once the station was shut off and he was the last one left, he returned to his usual broadcasting studio, hooked his usual microphone up to a loudspeaker, and turned them on.

"Hello?" Alastor stood in the middle of the room with his microphone. His instinct was to speak into it, as usual; he had to remind himself a couple of times to hold it out instead, like he was interviewing somebody invisible. "Anyone here?" He knew there was; he could feel the gaze on him. Every once in a while during his evening shift he'd been sure he'd felt a hand on his shoulders or arms, like his visitor was trying to catch his attention. "You can talk into this little doohickey, it's called a microphone."

He expected vague whispers, indistinct words, like trying to listen to a broadcast from a station too far away to hear; maybe a "hello" or a "who are you?" if he was lucky, at best a sentence every once in a long while, like the one he'd heard in his room.

What he got was a voice so clear he briefly thought there was someone else in the room with him: "Oh, this is _fascinating._ Can you hear—? Yes, that's _much_ clearer than in your room, isn't it."

Alastor froze, breath held, microphone out. The voice was higher than he'd expected—half the biographies said that people tended to be startled by his voice, but Alastor had never quite been able to hear it correctly in his head. It was faintly British-sounding and faintly noble-sounding, but not as much as Alastor had expected.

And his voice was so clear that Alastor could even hear how it was muffled when he turned away from the microphone to inspect the speaker. "And it comes out over there—? Remarkable. Yes, we've got the designs for most of this in Hell, but it's rudimentary hobbyist stuff that's only been around for a few months, we're clearly at least half a decade behind you. A few newcomers have _mentioned_ the new long-range towers but nobody's shown up with the _designs_ yet—isn't that always the case, all you get is witless witnesses who talk about the newest thing like it's fantasy and it's at least another decade before anyone who knows how to _make_ the thing shows up—I was about ready to just attempt to design a tower like this myself, I'd _kill_ to have wireless communication like this between my ships, but if I could get a look at _this_ place's specs before I go back..."

His voice was so clear, Alastor could even hear when his sssibilant ssyllablesss stretched and blended with the underlying hiss of the white noise.

Alastor sank down into his chair. He obviously had a technology-hungry engineer on the line. The odds seemed good that he had, in fact, gotten exactly who he'd originally intended to get. "You said you're in—you're from _hell?_ "

"Well—" (There was a touch to Alastor's hand, and he quickly jerked it back up to raise the microphone again) "—you didn't expect me to get into _Heaven,_ did you?"

"Then you _are_...?" Alastor swallowed hard. "Who are you?"

"I think you _know_ who I am."

Alastor's grin widened. (He always grinned when he spoke into the microphone; it made his voice sound right on the radio.) "I don't want you to just agree with me because I said it first! I want to hear _you_ say it."

"Sir Pentious. The honor's all yours, I'm sure."

Alastor slid down in his seat, silently mouthing, _Wow._

Of course—Alastor should have suspected that he'd actually made contact with who he'd meant to. He should have suspected the half-snake from his dream had been his original target. His name was _Serpent_ -ious, wasn't it? Alastor just hadn't imagined that Sir Pentious would no longer look _human_. _  
_

_Did_ he no longer look human? Or had the dream merely been symbolism? Did the dead look like anything at all?

Before he had an opportunity to ask, Sir Pentious spoke again: "So tell me. How is it that I've found myself back in the land of the living?"

After a five-minute summary of Alastor's work and his experiment—which he got the impression Sir Pentious found silly, but flattering—the conversation devolved into a mutual attempt to interrogate each other as fast as possible.

Sir Pentious had a vague idea of current events from "the newcomers"—the newly dead, Alastor gathered—and the papers (hell had newspapers) all had mortal affairs sections with reports from the living world; but _all_ news was just a _little_ bit out of date, and dependent on the memories of people who had just spent the last few hours to months actively dying. At any rate, Sir Pentious rarely had an opportunity to talk to the new arrivals himself. He wanted to know _all_ about this wonderful new cutting-edge technology that this oh so helpful young man seemed to be an expert in.

Alastor, on the other hand, wanted to know all about hell and about the mechanics of Sir Pentious's current state of existence. _Could_ humans become demons, as he suspected? Was _Sir Pentious_ a demon, or still human? How did things like demonic evocations and garden-variety seances work from the spirits' side of things? Why had Alastor been able to summon Sir Pentious but not to bind him in the circle in which he'd been summoned?

Alastor managed to seize the reins on the conversation by informing Sir Pentious that Alastor could dig up every bit of knowledge he could on the construction and operations of radio towers at _any_ time of day—and would be _happy_ to later, in fact—but he could only get answers to _his_ questions during the limited time he could offer Sir Pentious unlimited access to the microphone. Under that logic, Sir Pentious grudgingly agreed with Alastor's reasoning and yielded the conversation to him. And Alastor finally got to conduct a proper interview.

So— _could_ humans become demons?

All the dead damned were demons. That's what they were called, at least. But they were a different class of demons from the ones born in Hell—weaker. For the most part, both socially and magically powerless. But Sir Pentious had heard of a few humans who _had_ made the transition—Queen of Hell Lilith Magne, for instance.

What had the summoning felt like?

Sort of vaguely like dying in reverse. Losing consciousness and waking up disoriented in a dimension where everything felt wrong and unfamiliar. He'd sensed the edges of that little circle he presumed Alastor had drawn to try to hold him—it had felt like an abrupt shift in temperature from cold to hot—but he hadn't felt any compulsion to remain inside the circle, which he assumed had been Alastor's reason for drawing it.

So Alastor had successfully used a demon evocation to summon a perfectly normal human ghost instead?

Well, Sir Pentious didn't know anything about summonings or seances or all that nonsense—he was an inventor, not a magician—but sure. It sounded like a reasonable enough theory to him.

As they spoke, Alastor got more and more comfortable at his usual post: leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk, microphone in hand so he could speak into it just like he was broadcasting.

Except he wasn't broadcasting, and the microphone wasn't for him. It was for Sir Pentious, who now must have been forced to lean almost directly over Alastor in order to speak into the microphone himself.

Which Alastor only realized when he felt a heavy weight on his chest.

One of Alastor's feet slipped off his desk and his tilted chair legs landed back on the floor with a thud.

The weight moved, sliding against his chest, shifting so that now it was in between his spread knees rather than leaning in front the side. Alastor's breath hitched. He didn't know how he hadn't noticed the touch earlier; now that he was conscious of it, it was so _cold_. Like the first burst of winter air in his face when he stepped out of a house with the fireplace running. A cold so exhilarating he could hardly breathe from it.

"I've been meaning to ask," Alastor said, and cleared his throat by habit before he continued—his voice wouldn't come through clearly like that—"I, uhh, I... had an odd dream after I summoned you. Of a demon that looks like a snake from the waist down? Covered in eyes?" Whatever it was slowly sliding in between Alastor's thighs, it was far more flexible than any thigh bone.

"Would you be referring to the dream you were having when you made a mess of yourself?"

Alastor's face flushed. "Er."

" _Flattering_ , by the way."

Alastor quickly moved on. "So that _was_ you?"

"Of course. You thought it wasn't? Is _that_ why you were doing that research this morning?"

Right, Sir Pentious had just been hovering around watching the whole time, hadn't he? Alastor wondered what would have happened if he'd just _asked_ the presence he'd felt near him to identify itself. Last time he made the mistake of keeping his mouth shut.

"Don't tell me you thought I was _Amon,_ " Sir Pentious went on.

"I was considering my options. I thought he could have shaved."

Sir Pentious's laugh was hardly more than a hiss, like a brief upswell in the speaker's static.

"You know, every biography I've got on you talks about how much of your life you kept secret—but if you were secretly twice as tall as the average man and sporting an anaconda where your legs should be, I'd think they would have dug that out by now. How, uhh—" Alastor was sure he'd just felt the tip of the tail wrap around his ankle. "How'd that happen?"

"This is what human souls look like when you peel the body off."

Alastor considered that; then dubiously asked, "Like snakes?"

"Like monsters. Maybe the ones that go upstairs get to look pretty; I wouldn't know."

"Really? _All_ human souls?" _That_ hadn't been in any of his readings; but most of those texts were focused on the celestial ranks and their fallen cousins. Not much time was wasted on powerless mortal souls. "Is there any way to tell what I'm going to look like before I get down there?"

"I think it's mutable until you die," Sir Pentious said. "You talk like you already know you're going 'down there.' Why is that? Bargained off your soul?"

"I'd sooner drink arsenic." What was every honor, power, and treasure in the world worth if he didn't retain ownership of himself? "No, I'll plead my case mightily to Peter—but there's half a dozen poor souls in unmarked graves all up the Mississippi that are probably just waiting for their chance to testify against me."

Alastor had never confessed that to anyone before. It felt unnatural to be confessing it now—like this was some strange dream. It certainly seemed like one, alone with his microphone in the middle of the night with the ghost of a would-be dictator.

"I _thought_ something about you seemed... _interesting_." (Alastor felt invisible fingertips against his collarbone.) "You have quite a diverse set of hobbies. Performing on the radio, bar hopping, cooking, summoning the damned, murdering..."

" _And_ I play violin." He played several things, but guy who'd lived and died within Victoria's reign, he was probably into violin, right?

"You almost remind me of myself." He sounded fond. "Why do you ask about my body all of the sudden? Were you, perhaps, reminded of it?"

Alastor felt invisible fingers creeping up his throat. "Uh—perhaps. I might have been."

"Hm. Reminded how? Can you feel it?" (Alastor felt an invisible tail press his thighs further apart and rub tantalizingly against the bulge forming in his pants.) "Would you _like_ to feel it?"

Alastor nearly stopped breathing. " _Well..._ "

Oh, did he ever. To a shocking extent—he had never before. But he had never received an offer from a snake-ghost-demon-conqueror, had he? But he'd have to clean up when he was done, possibly run home quickly to shower—did he have time to do all that before his morning shift started? They'd only been here an hour or so, right?

Alastor looked at the clock.

Here Alastor was with an invisible megalomaniac in his lap and a raging boner, and he had less than ten minutes before he was expected to unlock the building.

He groaned.

###

Usually, jerking off was a mundane, mechanical act for Alastor. Just cleaning out the pipes a couple of times a week. No different from anything else he had to do in the toilet.

Usually, he couldn't feel hands ghosting around his waist and a tail coiling around his legs.

###

When Alastor's coworkers noted that this was the second morning in a row he hadn't brought in any entertainment to play on the radio, he said that, this morning, the radio _was_ the entertainment. Radio itself was as much a hot topic as anything that could be heard _on_ the radio—why, some papers even dedicated a weekly section just to news about radio!—so surely the public would be interested to hear about how the station did business, wouldn't they?

He cheerily ambushed each arriving employee at the door and talked them into coming into his studio, one by one, and explaining to all their dear listeners at home their jobs at the station and the various machinery they were in charge of—in as much detail as they cared to. Alastor (whose bookcase, where it wasn't hiding tomes on devils and villains, was stuffed with pamphlets and newly-published books about how radios worked) acted as interpreter and support for the behind-the-scenes workers who usually weren't on the air, happily translating from electrical engineer into English and describing the tools and diagrams they'd hastily scooped up from their workstations to bring into the studio. He even got one of his interviewees into a discussion on hotly-anticipated new advances in radio technology and the basics on the science behind how it worked.

And the whole time, he felt invisible eyes on him, and sometimes a cold hand on his shoulder.

Hadn't Alastor promised Sir Pentious that he'd get him everything he wanted to know about how radio towers worked?

(Alastor was told as he was leaving for the day that this had been entertaining as a one-off thing, but he wasn't going to get away with calling in his coworkers to serve as a cover every day he failed to bring in a band to put on the show. Alastor remembered when he used to get scolded for bringing in jazz bands like a kid bringing home a stray cat. He promised to have some music again tomorrow.)

At home, after dinner/breakfast, he went to his room, tuned his radio to the late morning soap operas, pulled out several of his best texts on radios, and spread out newspaper clippings across the bed and several more books on his desk. He turned a page at random every couple of minutes, stopping if the radio show was interrupted with a burst of near-unintelligible static, and assuming that Sir Pentious could go examine the clippings on the bed if Alastor was turning too slow.

It was well past Alastor's usual bedtime and it had been days since he'd gotten a normal day's sleep. He kept idly flipping pages and trying to keep up with the plots of shows he usually wasn't awake to hear until he fell asleep at his desk.

###

And woke up with _somebody_ curling around him from behind, red-clawed hands on his chest and stomach and trailing downward.

Alastor sat up with a gasp. "Oh, hello."

"You've been _ssso_ very helpful." The whisper came from right next to Alastor's ear, and the hiss wasn't from the interference of radio white noise but from the tongue flicking next to Alastor's face. "I thought I ought to exsspresss my gratitude."

Alastor thought Sir Pentious's gratitude had been quite fully expressed already, what with the intel he'd given Alastor last night on demons, evocations, and life in the afterlife—Alastor could write his _own_ damn grimoire now if he wanted to—but if Sir Pentious was that eager to thank him again.

Alastor leaned back into Sir Pentious's embrace. "Well, who am I to say no to such a generous offer."

Alastor was beginning to wonder again whether or not this really was a succubus/incubus that had disguised itself as Sir Pentious specifically to seduce him. If so, it had done the job better than dozens of women and more than a handful of men ever had. Alastor was going to have a hell of a bonus story for that nervous priest in Baton Rouge the next time Alastor visited him to anonymously confess another murder.

"Where is this?" Alastor murmured.

Sir Pentious's fingers paused on the second button on Alastor's shirt. "Your room, isn't it?"

"It looks different." The light was wrong—not electric, not the glow of sun through the curtains, but red around the edges, like a fire without the flickering. "More significantly, _you_ look different."

" _Do_ I?"

Alastor twisted around to glance back at Sir Pentious's face. "Visible."

Sir Pentious smirked, and Alastor was struck by the similarity, despite the scales and fangs, to the picture in his biography. "Everything looks the same to me," he said. " _You_ look different, though." His gaze was focused on Alastor's mouth.

Alastor touched his lips, didn't feel anything strange, and stuck a finger in his mouth. His skin caught on a row of sharp fangs. It felt like he'd always had them. "Huh."

" _And_ you're a redhead."

Alastor could do without _that_ part. "What is this?" he asked. "Am I, uh..." The phrase he was reaching for was _astral projecting_. Not finding it, he instead asked, "broadcasting myself?"

"I wouldn't know; you're the demon-summoner," Sir Pentious said, shrugging, before casually reaching down to start unbuttoning Alastor's pants and suspenders. (Reminded of the task at hand, Alastor quickly reached up to start unbuttoning Sir Pentious's shirt—he had an eye in the middle of his chest.) "But whatever you did, I'd say _you're_ where _I_ am currently."

"Huh," said Alastor. "Now, how did I do that?"

And then Sir Pentious slid Alastor's pants off his hips, grabbed his ass, and leaned in to kiss him; Alastor flung his arms around Sir Pentious's shoulders and kissed him back; and that was the last thing either one of them said for a while.

###

Alastor briefly peeled the top half of his body away from Sir Pentious's to satisfy a curiosity that was gnawing at him even more strongly than his present rarely-awakened hunger. "Is this how radio always feels on your side?"

"Come again?" While Sir Pentious waited for Alastor to clarify, he pulled him back in and nibbled at his collarbone.

"The— _oh..._ " Alastor shivered, pressing into the light bites, letting his eyes slide shut. "I can _feel_ them—the signals. Is that how you've been manipulating them?"

That gave Sir Pentious pause. "No, I just talk to them. If I'm close enough, they simply... react."

Alastor dimly remembered hearing something about electric lights flickering in the presence of ghosts.

"What do you mean, you 'feel them'?"

"I can hear what they're saying," Alastor said. "Every station, simultaneously."

"You _hear_ them?"

"Sure. Do you want farm talk or do you want the homemakers' hour?"

"No," Sir Pentious said, and Alastor laughed. "I think that's just you."

"Wow." Just him. What did that mean, that it was just him? " _Wow._ "

"You know," Sir Pentious said, dragging Alastor from his thoughts, "it's been a while since I've been with a normal human."

Over thirty years, Alastor expected. "Well?" He propped his head on one hand and hoped he looked somewhat alluring. "How is it so far?"

"Nostalgic," Sir Pentious said, trailing a hand down Alastor's back. (Alastor hoped that wasn't code for disappointing.) "And with an _admirer_ , too. I haven't had as many admirers lately."

Surprised, Alastor asked, "Well, why not? I would have thought that Hell of _all_ places would be full of people who could appreciate your work."

Sir Pentious smirked lazily. "Aren't you sweet." Alastor expected Sir Pentious was the only person on the planet who would still call him "sweet" within a few hours of learning about his hunting habits. "But Hell's full of horrors, you know. I might be the greatest horror the human race has ever produced, but even the worst humans are rather low on the ladder compared to the native hellspawn. On earth, I'm a _legend_... but in Hell, I'm just a _politician_."

"Egregious slander," Alastor said with mock indignity. "We've seen our fair share of politicians in New Orleans, and you, sir, are _far_ worse than that."

"Now you're just sucking up to me," Sir Pentious said gleefully. He re-tightened his coils around Alastor's legs. "I admit, I'm rather fond of that look of _awe_ you keep giving me."

"Do I?"

"Oh, yes." Sir Pentious rolled both of them over so he was on top of Alastor. "In fact, I'd say I'm very, _very_ fond of it."

Alastor was very, very fond of that look of wicked, greedy hunger Sir Pentious kept giving him.

He reached up, enthusiastically kissed Sir Pentious, and pulled him down.

###

Alastor woke up at his desk with a crick in his neck, sleep drool on his arm, and sticky underwear again.

The radio was playing the evening broadcast of children's bedtime stories.

Sir Pentious was gone.

Alastor got up to wash off, start breakfast, and decide which parts he was going to leave out of the essay on this experiment he was going to send to his pen pal in Memphis.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm just gonna dump my research here, y'all okay with that?
> 
> Here's the [Pseudomonarchia Daemonum](http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/weyer.htm) and the [Dictionnaire Infernal](https://archive.org/details/DictionnaireInfernal1863/mode/2up), which I chose as the two occult texts Alastor has on hand because the _Pseudomonarchia_ is foundational for a whole lot of Western Christian demonology, including the strain that's being used in Hazbin Hotel itself (based on the symbols they're using and the inclusion of characters like Stolas), and because the _Dictionnaire_ is 1) illustrated, and 2) French. [Check out this portrait of Amon](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Aamon.jpg). Alastor uses the French versions of demon names (such as Martym instead of Bathin) because I decided he decided the _Dictionnaire_ is more authoritative on account of the fact that it's a dictionary, and also he probably got it first. I didn't describe his summoning/evocation ritual, but I imagine that he went with the _Pseudomonarchia_ 's instructions, which are a lot simpler than what's found in a lot of later grimoires. (No drawing complicated sigils, for starters.)
> 
> Information on the status of radio stations in the mid-1920s comes from an issue of the [Indianapolis Times](https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015313/1925-01-08/ed-1/) from 1925, which includes a dedicated weekly section on radio news, a handy little article about recent and as-yet-anticipated developments in radio technology, a haphazard list of a bunch of stations' scheduled programs, And More!! I've decided Alastor's station runs on a 6am to 11pm schedule, with an hour before and after for employees to trickle in/out and go through setup/shutdown procedures, which from what I can tell seems to be a pretty ambitious schedule for a station in the mid-20s—nobody wanted to do jack in the mornings, which tbh is very relatable—but, none of those stations had Alastor's sparkling personality in the morning.
> 
> Post for this fic available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/619037251986407424/an-experiment-to-verify-the-phenomenon-of). Comments/reblogs there are very welcome (as are comments here)!


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